Dev Dawn

I haven’t seen a good troubadour character (in stories) for a while.

The last one I can distinctly remember on telly was in Gilmore Girls. Now that show used to be something ..

Ahem. The travelling minstrel, the wanderer, is a great character to use in stories. Especially noise media, movies, theatre, tv, even radio i suspect. You get a live onstage person. You can counterpoint what the characters are saying at that time with some music from the troubadour.

You couldn’t overuse the troubadour. Like i’m overusing troubadour the word. Troubadour. But in normal doses, they are a powerful tool in the creator’s arsenal.

Speaking of arsenal .. has anyone on the planet watched posh spice’s new tv show and thought “Now, I wish I could watch more of this classic telly!”. Actually, I guess there would be some people who thought that. Not me alas.

See, not knowing much of the posh spice world, and even though she is plastered across magazines and telly and the like, there was still an aura of .. grace. Or something closely resembling it. Maybe not that good, but cool and calm.

Then out comes this paris wannabe show and crushes that into dust. Then sweeps it out into a hurricane. There shouldn’t be room in the world for more than one or two crazy blonde women doing lame “i’m so dumb” impressions for the millions of adoring fans.

Bit of a rant. Got sidetracked from the troubadour.

I’ve been thinking of getting back into the comic drawing thing. It takes a lot of time. But still, is worth it I think.

Am trying to remember the situations I used to get in when playing Bards Tale. “Mapping My Way Home”, hacking the numbers so that my monk (or whatever he was) had negative sixty-five thousand hitpoints, checking every single wall panel for a secret door. Good times. Good times.

Anyway, just have to think of some logical Funny, and there would be a couple of good comics in those memories.

Okay.

Out of Rocky and Rambo, who would win?

At first, you’d think without a doubt Rambo. I mean, the guy has an arsenal of weapons that Rocky’s fists cannot compete with.

He also has some of Rocky’s grit and pluck and courage. Actually, quite a bit. I seem to remember leeches and electricity and Rambo surviving with enough strength to beat the living daylights out of many bad guys.

On the other hand, take Rambo and put him in Rocky’s world, and he’s just another big weapon-wielding crazy man. Rocky is beloved of the people. He’s the underdog. That has to count for something.

In the end though, it would be You (and me) who would win.

I mean, Stallone V. Stallone .. does it get any better?

Of course it does. You could have a many-way. Throw in Commando, Judge Dredd, Wesley from Demolition Man, and possibly the Dolph Lungren Punisher. Classic 80’s (I know, some of them weren’t made then) action.

It’d depend on location I would think. Once again, out of all of them, Rocky is the only one who is loved in a widespread fashion by the people .. and as is always the case, the people win out in the end (the underground folk in Demolition Man showed that there’s always someone being oppressed, the underdog .. and Rocky is, as said, the greatest underdog in movie history).

My pick is Rocky. Because of the populace. They would vote. Because fighting always comes down to popularity and voting. Doesn’t it? Or is that politics?

Oh the tears. This video from the Grouper site is just that funny. I’m not sure what Crackle is .. but a simple google search would probably fix that.

But it makes me wonder. What if some of these big web and desktop entities were objects? Better yet, what if they were Transformers?

Smells like someone with good comic skills should draw something up. I would, but the prerequisite was _good_. Might still give it a shot.

Last night I got some very nice work done on the current Clarion after hours project. Finally got somewhere with Insight Graphing and the NetTalk WebServer engine. I’m still struggling to understand some things .. but managed to get further than before.

One of the coolest things about this project, I’ve mentioned it before, it’s a personal banking helper system (online) .. is that the data is very meaningful.

Last night I fed in 9 months of bank transactions. That’s quite a nice chunk of information. And to be able to range and filter it in a meaningful way. Awesome.

For example, I can now see the exact amount of “Cash Outs” within any date period, in graph form. And there’s a good choice of graph types to choose from. Line, Scatter, Time, Pareto, Pie, Column (?) .. and probably some more.

Of course, graphing is so dependant on the context. A set of data will fit one type of graph really awesomely, but another it will suck.

So my job for the next while is to get a lot of different data sets happening.

The way I’m coming up with them (the data sets for reporting / graphing) is really simple. What do I want to know about my finances? Of course there will be a lot more than I know about .. but it’s a good start.

What if Barney (from How I Met Your Mother) and The Todd (from Scrubs) found each other.

If the universe didn’t implode with all the awesomeness, then this pairing would make for some spectacular adventures.

We have two of the craziest characters invented for modern telly. Not as generally crazy as Kramer, very specifically focused. But imagine .. Barney and The Todd as each other’s wing men. Crazy.

That’s not to say I find the use of these characters in the show a little annoying. Barney especially, in season two of the show, was at once a sharp and witty connoisseur of dialogue coupled with a guy who came out with the lame cardboard one liners. It seemed like they lost their way with him for a few of the episodes, cannon fodder material.

Also, he’s been overused I feel. Barney is definately one of the coolest cats around, story wise. He can break you in half with laughter. The best Barney is out of the blue. If he’s sitting around, you can mostly tell when a Barney setup is coming.

What I love about How I Met Your Mother is that they surprise you and travel in other directions. The writers continue to show that they know sitcoms, and aren’t wrapped up in their own cliches.

The sensory depravation unit was a stroke of pure genius. And there have been many others. The listening to 500 Miles in the car trip. Classic.

The Todd .. not so sure. He’s one dimensional, but that’s what makes him funny.

I think with the loss of Laverne, the show suffered. Some of the best lines were with the Todd and Laverne (”I’m upgrading you to a Yes because you’re feisty”).

Anyway, ending this very opinionated post now.

Last week, our garage was broken into. Now .. we live in a block of 10 apartments (we’re number 10 .. whoot).

Our garage is underground, and you have an electronic roller door as the guardian to our car dungeon.

Not only that, but unit number 10 gets a special batcave. We have our own electronic roller door, on a rather nice and large car hold (ha ha .. moe (Simpsons) gets me every time with that line). There’s a bunch of boxes full of assorted stuff stacked at the end of our carhold. Decided one word was better than two.

Last week, when the Thieves (decided they were important enough for a capital, as you’ll see down the page) broke in, they smashed the windows of two other cars. Then, I can only imagine with the strength of ten tigers, or hulk smashing, or a proton energy pill .. they reefed open our garage door, like you rip open a tin of sardines. Well, almost like that.

Anyway, our nice new (9 months) people mover was in the garage. They left it unmolested. They also did not seem to have touched a single item of stacked boxes, computer game cases, plastic boxes, boxes .. and a big not-working airconditioner.

There really is nothing of value in there. Except my skateboard. Ahhh the memories.

This morning, as I was saying goodbye to the family, the police stepped out of the lift.

Turns out that a replica moment was enacted last night. Can’t be sure if it was the same hooligans .. whoops, Thieves .. but they broke the windows on the same car as last time (one of them at least), and the peeled back our now-damaged door again.

This time however, they really got stuck into the boxes and so forth at the back of our carhold. It’s messy now. Real messy.

I’m very smart though. You see, for the past few months, the twin fluorescent lights in our car room haven’t been working that well. The light is very dim.

See my plan. By being lazy, I have hindered the Thieves. If they could have seen by the bright snazzy normal fluro light, perhaps they could have found something, or been more organised.

As it is, they had to take stuff out into the real lights to see what was inside. And they only managed to take one bag outside.

Fortunately for us, not so for them, it contained nothing more than fake jewelry and my old baby clothes.

Apart from a slight concern now that it’s premeditated crime (the first could have been opportunistic), I have to wonder ..

Let’s hit up this place again. Maybe this time the junk in the back of their Carhold will have drugs, or real jewelry, or computer parts we can sell for drugs. Or whatever it is we want.

How about this. We’ll go through their stuff this time, but for the second time, we’ll leave their new car alone. Not only that, but we won’t break into cars that are actually expensive looking, we’ll target middle of the range cars.

I’m afraid I don’t really understand the stealing brain. But then, that’s okay.

So while I’m sitting here, waiting for a huge app to compile .. thought I’d share some pain.

I have a thread variable that is being set with 180 before it’s used. I’ve done the usual searching (through the txas and using UltraEdit search in files) for anything using the thread variable. It’s all kosha.

So then .. I thinks to myself .. I’ll use another thread, but call the same procedure.

THREAD:Dummy is in place, calling the browse procedure .. and BAM .. what do you know, it works. And then, on closing, it clears the original thread variable, so when i call the procedure using the actual thread, it works.

But restart the program, and it’s back to 180. Very strange. If I figure it out, will try and remember to update this post.

Edit:

Turns out the problem was I had two (that’s right, read em), TWO global thread objects being declared. One was not created by me, one was.  Anyway. My lack of understanding how programming works wins the day again.

Facebook is on the rise. It’s not too hard to see the same signs as with previous big deals. YouTube, Flickr, .. others .. i guess.

Anyway, even though they probably won’t sell .. the whole buzz that is firing up smells the same. Lots of people == lots of greed .. i mean money.

Jono asked me about it a while ago. So decided to take a look. And I have to say .. it’s cool. The “Wish I’d thought of that” cool. These applications are getting way beyond simple. Facebook allows you to construct pretty much whatever you want within it’s own framework. Kind of like Second Life without the graphics.

I guess we’ll see what happens in a few months. Christmas seems to bring about big news. Maybe they’ll knock back a billion dollar deal from Microsoft. Maybe not.

Was just reading this post, http://www.devdawn.com/id-cry-if-there-were-any-tears-left. I had some big plans earlier in the year.

I guess they are still alive, just barely. I’d still like to create software and sell it myself.

You know the biggest problem i faced?

It was the selling part. The simple act of knowing that people can now buy my stuff.

Getting the shop together on the website wasn’t hard, it needs a bit of work, but that’s straight-forward. And deciding on prices .. same. These are just decisions. I’d gotten a PayPal account, which would take care of security.

But the idea that people could soon be paying for these products seemed ludicrous to me. I mean, i’d barely spent two months on the three (DeleteThem, SecretKeep and Rasp) from conception to where they are now. And of the three, Rasp is the only one really worth much.

I guess it will always be a problem. Worry that the site is lame, that the presence will be unprofessional, that the company name is waaay too long.

So, the future rarely and barely listens to me. That’s not bad. It’s just interesting to look back even 6 months and see how much has changed.

Man i forget a lot of stuff. The price of being a hype-monkey i suspect.

I need a little less hype, a little more action.

It was at the recent Aussie (Clarion) DevCon that I got to see one of my big crutches.

In the first day of Capesoft Training, very early on, I was struggling to concentrate on doing work.

It was music.

You see, for a few years now, I’ve developed a pavlovian response/need to have headphones on and music going while developing.

It’s quite bizarre. Kind of crazy. And I might one day have to seriously consider breaking me of it.

The question for the moment is ..

What are your development crutches?

MS really did it right with the Express Editions of their Development tools. I like the idea very much

It would be interesting to get some stats on what products are being created (or started) with the Express editions. I’d like to know how MS is measuring the success of this strategy. Letting people have, for free, a chunk of a development tool.

Makes me wish that SV had an Express Edition of Clarion. I realise this is probably in the works for 7. I hope so.